ShmoopTube

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Thank you We sneak Charles dickens the marriage plot allow

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shmoop i think a lot of students are confused or

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irritated by the fact that lots of victorian novels all

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seem to be about marriage and they're all about trying

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to get married And then once the marriage happens that's

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the end of the novel we see that in earlier

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works for example like jane austen's books are really very

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much about that The marriage plot becomes a huge issue

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and i think it's important for students know that that

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is not for the reasons we think those parts are

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not so much about romance are sort of chick flick

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topics like we might identify them in the early twenty

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first century They're really about power and money and for

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women of the period in many cases the only way

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in which women could have power or money and could

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get themselves out of a difficult circumstances was by marrying

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and enfranchising themselves through their husband So in this period

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you see for example things like divorce laws changing to

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condone property who can vote all that kind of stuff

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is cropping up regarding women in the nineteenth century when

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say dickens was a feminist necessarily But he definitely understands

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why Things like unhealthy marriages or prostitution or single motherhood

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presents an enormous and really unfair difficulty in this period

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What was the marriage plot Actually about What did women

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seek to attain through marriage in the early nineteenth century 00:01:36.61 --> [endTime] Money power respect

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